STUPID MUSIC QUOTE # 12

“Lippa’s…one of these young(ish) composers who are all Sondheim and no tunes. Jason Robert Brown’s another one, though I hear his score to “Honeymoon in Vegas” is surprisingly catchy. Ricky Ian Gordon is one, too. They’re smart, accomplished musicians, but if you put a gun to their heads, they wouldn’t be able to write “Happy Birthday”.” (Michael Riedel, New York Post)

Seriously? LIPPA? _Andrew Lippa_ is ‘all Sondheim and no tunes’? I don’t mean to be rude, but have you ever heard one of Lippa’s scores? For those who don’t know, Lippa is generally lumped in with the post-Sondheim generation because of when he showed up and the fact that his first two scores of any note were for quirky off-Broadway cult flops (John and Jen and The Wild Party, to be specific), but his music is far from what any normal person would consider avant-garde. His score for The Wild Party is far more frequently compared to Rent and Wicked (with which it shares multiple cast members) than to anything in the vein of Guettel or Lachiusa, and his best-known Broadway work to date is on the Addams Family musical (obviously a complex and difficult work of the musical avant-garde scene). This idiot also claims that Lippa contributed to Audra McDonald’s Way Back to Paradise album, which he did not, nor would his music have fit in especially well on that disc if he had. The lack of fact-checking I can forgive, but accusing Lippa of being alienatingly avant-garde is just absurd on its face. You might as well say the same thing about Jonathan Larson or Lin-Manuel Miranda; at least they have a personal connection to Sondheim to cement them in that category.

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